“It’s over now.  The best thing that could happen to him has happened,” he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of life itself, consoling, strengthening, restoring.

In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of Cousin Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of O’Hara.  The ghastly details of George’s burial were not only taken out of her hands, she was hardly permitted to know even that they were necessary.  All explanations were made, not by her, but by O’Hara; and when they returned together from the cemetery, Gabriella brought with her a feeling that she had been watching something that belonged to O’Hara laid in the earth.  But when she tried to thank him, she found that he was apparently unaware that he had done anything deserving of gratitude.

“Oh, that’s nothing.  Anybody would have done it,” he remarked, and dismissed the subject forever.

For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one Saturday afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard’s, they met by chance and walked home together.  It was the first time she had been in the street with him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly young and girlish—­she, the mother of a daughter old enough to have love affairs!  A soft flush—­the flush of youth—­tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so often dragged wearily after the day’s work, was as buoyant as Fanny’s; and her low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by innumerable anxieties.  As they passed a shop window, her reflection flashed back at her, and she thought happily:  “Yes, it is true, you are better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at twenty.”

“Shall we walk down?” asked O’Hara, and added:  “So that was your shop?  I am glad that I saw it.  But what do you do there all day?”

She laughed merrily.  “Put in pins and take them out again.  Design, direct, scold, and flatter.  We are getting in the spring models now, and it’s very exciting.”

He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the bunchiness around the hips.

“Did you make that?” he inquired.

“This coat?  Oh, no; it came from Paris.  It was left on my hands,” she explained, “or I shouldn’t be wearing it.  I wear only what people won’t buy, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know,” he returned abstractedly, and she observed humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because he was thinking so profoundly about her clothes.  It was his way, she had discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the object before him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might appear.  He seemed never to have learned how to divide either his interest or his attention.

“If you could make what you wanted,” he remarked, “I should think you’d make them more comfortable.  Are you going to wear those hobble skirts this spring?”